Glassblower Review: Glass Changed What Drinking Was

Before it, you could not see what you were drinking – and the moment you could, everything about wine changed

The Glassblower on Glasshouse Street holds a 4.3 from two thousand six hundred and twenty people, charges ten to twenty pounds, and it is named after the trade that used to be on the street.

And glass changed drinking more than any single thing that has ever happened to it.

What you drank out of before

Wood. Leather. Pewter. Horn. Pottery.

All of which are opaque.

Which means that for essentially the whole of human history, you could not see what you were drinking. You could smell it and you could taste it and that was all.

And the consequences of that are far larger than they sound.

What glass did

It made colour a property of wine.

Until you can see through the vessel, the colour of a wine is not information – it is not a thing anybody discusses, because nobody can see it. The entire modern vocabulary of wine appreciation, which begins with looking at it, is impossible.

It made clarity a virtue. A cloudy wine in a pewter cup is simply a wine. A cloudy wine in a glass is a fault, and the whole technology of fining and filtering follows from the fact that somebody can now see the problem.

And it made adulteration much harder, which is why the trade resisted it.

The Romans invented the technique

Glassblowing appears in the first century BC, in the Roman Levant, and it is a genuine technological revolution – because before it, glass had to be cast or core-formed, which is slow and expensive and produces small objects.

Blowing produces a vessel in seconds, from a gather of molten glass on the end of a tube, and it made glass cheap enough to be ordinary.

The Romans drank from it in enormous quantities. And then the western empire fell and the technique very largely went with it, and Europe went back to pottery and wood for a thousand years.

And the English got the coal

Which is the fact that finishes it.

English glass was made with coal-fired furnaces from the seventeenth century, and coal burns hotter than wood – which produced a stronger, thicker glass than anybody else could make.

And that is why the English bottle could hold the pressure of a sparkling wine when the French bottle exploded.

We wrote about that at the Champagne Bar in Notting Hill: Dom Perignon spent his career trying to prevent the bubbles, because the bottles exploded in the cellars in chain reactions and the cellarmen wore iron masks.

The English liked the fizz and had the glass to contain it, and there is a serious argument that sparkling champagne was perfected in London.

Verdict

Good pub, cheap for Soho, and a name from a trade that made it possible to see what is in your hand.

Glasshouse Street

Which is named after the works, and which is the point of the whole article.

A glasshouse was a furnace – and it was hot, filthy, dangerous work, and it was pushed to the edges of the built-up area because nobody wanted to live next to one.

Which means that a street called Glasshouse Street was, when it was named, on the outskirts.

It is now four hundred metres from Piccadilly Circus.

Every noxious trade in London has left a street name in a place that is now expensive – the tanneries, the tallow works, the potteries, the brickfields. We wrote about the Potteries in Notting Hill, which was a slum built on brick clay and pig farms and which is now among the most valuable land in Europe.

The dirt moved out. The names stayed.

Alan Nafzger

Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]